The Hebrew Scriptures that are often referred to as the Old Testament begin with these words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Those words are unique, but the concepts are found in the creation stories of many different religions and ethnic traditions.

Before there was land, there was water. Water is elemental. In nearly all stories of the beginnings of time water plays an important role. Archaeologists and biologists teach us that life on this planet began in the water. Before there were creatures that walked, there were creatures that paddled about in the water.

Before the wheel, there was the boat.

Think, if you will, of another part of our story - from a far more recent, yet still historic time: When the first restless Europeans came to this continent, they believed that they were bringing the wonders of the modern world to a new place. They had the worlds most sophisticated weapons systems of the time. They knew of gunpowder and firearms and had massive ships with multiple sails. They had some rudimentary skills at celestial navigation and a rough sense of direction, even though they lacked a full comprehension of the size of the planet. They saw themselves as explorers and discoverers and thought of they came from the height of civilization and were traveling to an uncivilized place.

When they arrived they discovered that the people of the land already had an elegant and sophisticated mode of transportation. While the Europeans struggled to row their skiffs and other landing craft facing rearward to get leverage on their oars, those welcoming them had sleek, fast and elegant canoes. They faced forward as they paddled and exerted much less effort to travel with great speed. I don’t know how many of the first explorers were aware of it, but those canoe-paddling people had neighbors to the north who had a marvelous craft called a kayak.

We live on a watery planet. We have been born with an urge to travel. That combination - the waters that surround us and the desire to go places - resulted in a nearly perfect device, made of skin and wood and sinew. Each was custom sized perfectly to the individual paddler and equipped with a stick carved to slice through the water and move it in a hydrodynamic motion like a propellor moves and airplane.

Watching these boats and their paddlers creates an almost instant desire to have one - to share the experience. European explorers were soon learning to make their own canoes and kayaks, though learning to pronounce the name of the craft resulted in a wide variety of spellings: kaiak, kick, kayak, kayak, qayaq. The name simply means “a person’s boat.” It is a custom craft, made for an individual.

I believe that the appeal of the craft in our world today stems from a few important qualities. The pace of the craft is perfect. One can paddle slowly with nearly no effort or more quickly. It is easy to discover a pace that can be sustained for long periods of time without injury or discomfort. In a world where the rate of change is accelerating, where the learning curve is so steep that we constantly feel that we are falling behind, it is a distinct joy to simply move at the pace of life - to travel at the same speed as you are thinking.

The boat takes us not only to interesting places in the physical world, it transports us to fascinating places of our minds. Although the peoples of central Australia are not people of the water and have no indigenous boats, they speak of the power of walking. They know that the pace is exactly right - the speed perfect - to transport one into dream time. If you travel at an appropriate speed, you are able to go to places that transcend the physical. Mixing the metaphor, it certainly feels like my kayak takes me to a dream space whether I paddle on the huge waters of the Pacific or in the quiet confines of a reservoir in the hills. When I am in my boat I relax from the anxieties of this sometimes crazy world and allow the waters that support me as I sit to float my spirit as well as my body.

Another quality of a good kayak is that they are long-lasting. So much so that unlike the cars we drive or other modes of transportation that we choose, they depreciate slower than inflation. That means that resale prices are often about the same as original purchase prices, making a kayak virtually free to own.

And if you think like I do, a factory-made boat is not ideal anyway. I fashion my boats out of scraps of wood. There is so much cutting and sanding involved in my particular style of building that the biggest byproduct of the process is sawdust. Cedar sawdust, however, is a very pleasant product, enriching the compost for the garden and helping with insect control when spread around the plants.

Like the pace of my paddling, I slow down when I am building a boat. It can take more than a year for me to produce a seaworthy craft. Some nights, like last night I only fit one or two pieces of wood to the craft. Some days I only look at the boat and think about how the next steps might go. It would be impossible for me to earn my living making boats. I go far too slowly. The number of boats I am capable of building is very small. And I enjoy paddling as much as I do building so when the weather is nice I’m more likely to be sitting in a boat than working on one.

As long as there are people on this planet, a few of us will choose to explore the planet with simple, human-powered boats that feel more like slipping on a garment than climbing into a craft. And as we paddle, our minds will wander and we will remember times long ago and dream of that which is yet to come.

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